Kurt Hentschläger

Press Review & Essays ZEE and FEED as of July 2014 Content

1. Between Math and Mystery: Kurt Hentschläger’s Immersive Installations, F Newsmagazine, Chicago 2014

2. G. Roger Denson: And Some See God: Getting to the CORE in the 3D and Immersive Art of Kurt Hentschlaeger, Huffington Post, New York 2013

3. Debbie Cuthbertson: MONA shines light into the darkness, THE AGE, Docklands 2013

4. Simon Jablonski: Abandon Normal Devices: Kurt Hentschläger, Daze, 2012

5. Paul John White: Kurt Hentschläger: ZEE, 2011

6. Amy Ellen: Zee at Abandon Normal Devices, flux, 2011

7. Gunnar Schmidt: Weiche Displays. Projektionen auf Rauch,Wolken und Nebel (Soft Displays. Projections on smoke, clouds and mist), excerpt on ZEE, Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin 2011

8. Mike Stubbs and Omar Kholeif: Abandon Normal Devices, Liverpool 2011

9. Jaenine Parkinson: Elektra 12, Montreal: Playing with your senses, artengine blog: art and technological experimentation, Ottawa 2011

10. David Stoesz: Please come to Seattle, ZEE!, Seattle Weekly, Seattle 2009

11. Zoe Roller: In Brief: ZEE, Art + Culture, 2009

12. Kenneth Baker: Art that causes pain, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco 2008

13. Jean St-Hilaire: «Feed»: le bouillon cosmique et nous, Le Soleil, Québec 2008

14. Barton McLean: Mind Altering to Say the Least, 2008

15. Marco Mancuso: FEED, Visible Space Collapse, Digimag, Milano 2007

16. Hubert Salden: Am Abgrund der Schönheit, artmagazine, Vienna 2007

17. Barton McLean: Interview with Kurt Hentschläger on FEED, SEASMUS Journal, The Journal of the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States, 2007

18. Francesco D’Orazio: FEED. An ob-scene performance, NIMMAGAZINE, Rome 2006

19. Feed: Performance di Kurt Hentschlager, netmage, Bologna 2006

20. Annet de Jong: FEED: Misselijkmakend en Misdadig. De Telegraaf, Utrecht 2006

21. Daniela Cascella: Il digitale come forza della natura, Bologna 2000 Between Math and Mystery

by F Newsmagazine (http://fnewsmagazine.com/wp-2/author/fnewsmag/) , January 31, 2014

Kurt Hentschläger’s Immersive Installations

Kurt Hentschläger, Cluster. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Chicago-based artist Kurt Hentschläger (http://www.kurthentschlager.com/) effectively merges art and science by way of his creative process, which eerily approaches transcendence through calculable technical systems. Using immersive sensory experience as a vehicle, his work is deeply layered and thought-provoking, handling themes of sublimity, consciousness, and human interconnectivity. Hentschläger’s widely exhibited, award-winning work transforms generative 3-D animation and audio technology into mesmeric, penetrating, and highly stimulating illusions that blur math and mystery, science and spirituality.

Growing up in a small industrial town in Austria, Hentschläger was exposed to Viennese Actionism

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viennese_Actionism) through the thriving punk subculture of the 1970s, which railed against Austria’s stultifying conservative government and its repressive cultural policies.

While not completely a part of these artistic and cultural movements, the shocking, confrontational aesthetic of Actionism and the exhilarating, hypnotic experiences of the Punk scene would go on to deeply affect the subject and style of pieces like Cluster (http://www.kurthentschlager.com/portfolio /cluster/cluster.html) and Feed (http://www.kurthentschlager.com/portfolio/feed/feed.html).

Cluster is an hour-long, real-time 3D computer animation that portrays group behavior. It primarily features a cluster of amorphous, human-like forms that interact with each other within a dark expanse of empty space. The background is black and vacant except for an outer frame that deflects the movement of the cluster several times as it moves from one place to another on the screen. The cluster travels as it expands and contracts. It changes its density and form, as figures are drawn in and pulled away. The nude figures that Hentschläger creates are generic in form, with few signifying features. The abstract representations of human forms shift our focus from the specific subject of humanity to the subject of biological life. The beings and the process depicted could almost be a colony of microorganisms instead of people. Cluster is a fascinating union of the scientific and the mysterious; it refers to the inscrutable inner workings and structures of the natural world through a highly technological process. Through sound and imagery, Hentschläger creates an immersive presence that interrupts the isolation of the viewer. The audio counterpart that plays during Hentschläger’s visual performance is directly responsive to the generative imagery on screen. Hentschläger utilizes the heavy vibrations of low bass tones to generate a tactile spatiality to the sound. Combined with the visuals, Cluster creates a kinetic, virtual space that immerses the audience in a strange, otherworldly environment. It feels as much internal as it does external. The music moves the artwork itself away from the visual realm of film towards a palpable realm of sensory experience. An unfortunate testimony to the intensity of his work emerged with Feed, a related piece that caused photosensitive epileptic seizures for some of its audience members. This ranged from reactions of disorientation and confusion to traumatic seizures and momentary losses of memory.

Kurt Hentschläger, Zee. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Hentschläger’s work is part of the emerging interest in collective behavior that is developing across a diverse array of artistic and academic fields. We want to know where else cooperative behavior can be found in society and nature, and why it occurs. What is the biology behind altruistic actions within microbial populations? There must be some evolutionary explanation behind the incidents of self-sacrifice that scientists have observed in bacteria. How do we define the collective power of communities, and the indescribable energy of a group that somehow exceeds the sum of its parts? How do cities form from the social serendipity and collaborative labor of dense populations? What is it that inspires people in close proximity to invariably engage in the highly cooperative task of group organization? In other words, what is the cooperative counterpart to Darwinian competition? In pieces like Cluster, Hentschläger portrays social interconnectivity and collectivism as a manifestation of instinct, in opposition to the familiar characterization of community as a romantic quirk of the human prefrontal cortex. Author Steve Johnson (http://www.theghostmap.com/) similarly describes Victorian

London as “a vast organism” in his 2006 book Ghost Map (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11

/12/books/review/Quammen.t.html?pagewanted=all), evoking the idea of a social network as complex as a living, conscious animal. Both artists are examining the fundamental organic mechanism behind communities of organisms. This often forgotten aspect of human nature is becoming increasingly pertinent in a rapidly urbanizing world. As we decide how best to organize ourselves, we have to understand how organizations form in nature.

Hentschläger’s piece Zee is an installation that uses stroboscopic light, thick fog, and droning sound to similarly transform a simple room into a strangely undefined otherworldly region. Much like his contemporary, the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson (http://www.olafureliasson.net/index.html), whose large-scale installations put “the body in the mind and the mind in the body,” Hentschläger de-familiarizes participants in a constructed sensory environment. Zee begins with a guide who leads participants into a room with a rope, but then encourages them to wander around freely. In some cases, people experienced hallucinatory visions and many participants compared their experience with

Zee to their conceptions of heaven or death. The space itself is a marriage of contradictions in sheer intensity — the participants feel surrounded, but completely alone. They feel entirely aware and

And Some See God: Getting to the CORE in the 3D and Immersive Art of Kurt Hentschlaeger

Posted: 11/27/2013 8:55 am

This is the third in a series on visual artists who have embraced, redefined and subverted the computer-generated imaging (CGI) and 3D-simulation modeling originally developed to compose special effects graphics and animation in mainstream film, video, gaming, and high end advertising. See Part 1 of this series, Projecting the Future of Painting in Claudia Hart's 3D Utopian eScapes; Part 2, Matthew Weinstein: When the Revolution Comes, It Will Be a 3D Animation Entertainment With Art Merchandizing; and Part 4, PostPictures: A New Generation of Pictorial Structuralists is Introduced by New York's bitforms Gallery.

Core from Kurt Hentschläger

With two November 2013 installations opening the same day -- one at the Paris Nemo Festival and one at the United Arab Emirates' Sharjah Art Foundation -- the reputation of Kurt Hentschlaeger, the Austrian new media visionary now based in Chicago, continues to expand globally. For two decades, Hentschlaeger has been pushing international audiences toward newly-traced boundaries between the synthetic and the natural phenomena alluded to too often and too vaguely as the sublime. Although conventionally called an audio-visual artist, the nomenclature is inadequate for a polysensory maestro who, along with Pierre Huyghe, Ryoji Ikeda, and Olafur Eliasson, is to the installation art of the new millennial generation what Caspar David Friederich and William Blake were to the Romantic movement in 18th and 19th-century painting -- a frontiersman of sensory augmentation.

But whereas the Romantics saw themselves as ushering audiences to the precipice from which transcendental realms of ecstatic and spiritual rapture could be accessed, Hentschlaeger introduces audiences -- or more accurately, his performative-participants of our more materialist and pragmatic age -- to a full array of physical/virtual experiences conceived of as continuous and unbounded phenomenological infinitudes. Hentschlaeger is currently touring ZEE, a spatial-theatrical installation that is both audience-performative and experiential as a full touch-sense immersion into synthetic mists rhythmically timed to strobes of light. Besides Paris and Sharjah, ZEE has enveloped audiences at the Museum of New and Old Art at Hobart, Tasmania, Australia; the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (Fact), in Liverpool; the Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Mexico City; the File Festival, São Paulo; the Wave Exhibition, INDAF, Seoul; the Wood Street Galleries, Pittsburgh; and FuturePerfect, in New York.

The universality of Hentschaeger's media language accounts for his popularity throughout Europe, Asia and the Middle East, as the language of his sensory- environmental installations in particular are both sub-linguistic and sub-semiotic. By this I mean the artist synthesizes an experiential primordiality that heightens our awareness to a devolutionary state of awareness before sight was made the primary, directive sense of animal existence, along with our own, all-too-human distraction from our less- developed, external senses for touch, taste and smell.

Not that the participants in Hentschlaeger's immersive installations have their vision entirely closed off. Upon entering the synthetic mists of his bounded environment, ZEE, sight is merely diminished in capacity so that touch, and to a lesser extent the senses of smell and taste, and even sensation of our internal organs and their vital functions (pulse, pressure. breath, perspiration, temperature) are heightened to a ratio equivalent with sight and hearing. For some participants the heightening is so precipitously disorienting that Hentschlaeger has to issue warnings about the dangers to entrants prone to seizures. It's not rare that people have to be escorted out of his womb-like returns, though more often because of the anxiety that so intimates an awareness with one's own body than any physical danger. Less frequently, the strobes trigger epileptic seizures in participants suffering from photosensitivity.

Hentschlaeger is also circulating a corpus of 3D animation video installations that boldly convert old-age mytho-metaphysical models of a transmigratory "ectoplasmic" variety of life force at the edge of some virtual-electromagnetic spectrum. Throughout 2012, Hentschlaeger's CORE, a 3D animation, five-channel video projection installation, was shown in the London 2012 Festival coinciding with the Summer Olympics, where it startled and captivated audiences both for its bold spectacle of virtual fantasia and its metaphysical implications as a commentary on human behavior. After having blackened a cavernous 19th-century engine shop at the Ironbridge George Museum in Shropshire, England -- a historical preservation site renowned as one of the earliest centers of the Industrial Revolution -- Hentschlaeger projected a quintet of videos depicting large-scale "swarms" of virtual, faceless humanoid drones engaged in an enthralling hive-like flight - - one weightlessly synchronized as a ballet of perpetual convergence and dispersal. Instead of evoking the spectral souls of wishful faiths and myths, Hentschlaeger's humanoid swarm mindlessly scatters and converges in formation as if the figures collectively, yet intricately, demarcate a living, breathing universe -- perhaps the kind imaginably endowed as an anthropomorphic prime mover or force. In this, the clustering movement of the collective is more evocative of a school of fish, flock of birds or herd of animals, impelled by a common instinct or constraint, than a race of Homo Sapiens imbued with free will.

The effect of seeing an aerial choreography virtually performed by a cluster of human forms so devoid of individualism and choice is at the same time rapturous and profoundly disturbing for its suggestion of a perpetual afterlife or eternal utopia outside space-time and premised on absolute submission and subjugation. When considered against the real historical backdrop of 19th-century capitalist industrialization and consumerism specific to Ironbridge, the work pointedly takes on moral and political implications in its modeling of a single-purposed communality analogous to human worker drones sustaining a dangerously totalitarian or oligarchical power.

CORE is the culmination of a body of 3D virtual video projections the artist has shown since 2000 in such settings as The Venice Biennale, The National Art Museum of China in Beijing, The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, PS1-Clocktower in New York, and The Society for Arts and Technology in Montreal. In 2010, Hentschlaeger also received the prestigious QWARTZ Electronic Music Award in Paris. I asked Hentschlaeger to summarize what he'd intended to convey with the provocative virtual imagery of clustering bodies.

"I think the clustering-bodies body of work can be described analogously as unconscious bodies in a kind of Neverland, in-between state. There is a body of work now with four individual pieces: CLUSTER, which is a single screen live show, projected improvisationally (with me on hand controllers) that dates from 2010-2012. Then there is HIVE, which is a stereoscopic, single-screen installation from 2011. CORE, at Ironbridge, is my 2012 "symphonic" installation with five individual groups on five separate screens, each consisting of 23 bodies in projection format. And there is MATTER, a site specific composition for the new dome at the Society for Arts and Technology in Montreal, which opened May 30, 2012. I plan to do one other piece, called KOMA, with several screens and groups of bodies, in a surround setup, each group with a smaller number of bodies, rather than the 23 bodies that CORE features per screen."

CORE is essentially a work about unconsciousness in ways confrontational with the most basic and blatant audience presumptions concerning spirituality and mysticism. It's possible to see in CORE the same devotional reach for exalted human nature that William Blake sought in his search for the divine. It's an association that, in fact, Hentschlaeger encourages with the work's 2012 installment in Ironbridge, an English town that has preserved its Victorian legacy and ties to the romantic movement of which Blake was a part. Conversely, what can be described as a depiction of a single-minded attraction to a central magnetic and radiant force seems in accord with the definition some mystics and faithful have for spirituality as a letting go of all personal will and desire in a submission to a higher being and purpose.

CORE's audience was largely on hand to see the Summer Olympics, and as such Hentschlaeger found them to be comprised of greater diversity than the crowds who descend on the Venice Biennale, Documenta, and all the many international art biennials. The difference here is substantial: the great majority of people drawn to the Olympics or to Ironbridge's history weren't art-world-savvy, and thereby the issue of spiritual interpretation had the potential of becoming a thorny thicket. But Hentschlaeger, who doesn't personally subscribe to religion or spiritualism, anticipated this in his initial conceptualization of CORE.

"Spirituality is a problematic label," he told me. "I'm a nonbeliever in ideas of deities and higher powers. Reflecting on mysticism comes more easily, or at least the aspects of it that relate to states of consciousness -- aspects of reality, beyond normal human perception. The limits and malleability of human perception is one of my key areas of interest and extends to ideas of what can and can't be perceived and whether the unknown can be understood more than just as a concept, and beyond that can render anything but imaginary constructs, such as belief-based systems. In regards to my pseudo physics-driven work with virtual bodies, when I say that they are 'unconscious,' even this is misleading in that they have really no consciousness whatsoever as mere ephemeral constructs without ego, will, desire, emotions."

"Then again," he goes on, "being an art creation, they are informed by my own existence, ideas and will. And most of these ideas orbit around issues of technologically- induced fantasies of omni-control and omnipotence. So these floating bodies are initially empty vessels, free of ego and also individuality, particles rather than beings. It's just by their humanoid form and motion that we connect to them and project onto them subjectively. But also, the way that they move and cluster together in virtual zero gravity invokes historical references to angels, disembodied spirits, drifting souls, etc."

Hentschlaeger then brought the discussion back to the structures that underpin all his work: "Coming back to our contemporary obsession with control, functioning, managing, structuring, compartmentalizing, and the consequentially-inflicted orgy of material possessions (or in popular neurological terms-the dominance of left brain hemisphere processing), I find our civilization's craving for infinite comfort and control (of life inside and outside of ourselves) futile and ultimately prone to leading to the opposite of our desires. We are all being controlled by our drives and desires. I'm not advocating a dystopian model here, but rather am interested in a 'hyper-civilization' based on a historical process of emancipation from ancient belief systems. On the one end, it does engage the mystical 'complex' to connect to the larger unknown outside of oneself and transcending one's own prison of body and ego, while on the other side it still subscribes to rational thought and thus acknowledges the obvious duality of being both a discrete quasi-autonomous being as well as a particle within a mass. I have to add that, as a consequence of being 'ideologically non-committal,' the prototypical connoisseur of the romantic sublime tends to stay in a safe, albeit non-ironic distance, and thus very much remains locked into a position of observing rather than participating in the dangers of life."

The seed for Hentschlaeger's "floating body" oeuvre was planted when he designed a modest projection video and set design for the Paris Ballet Preljocajas. Commisioned by the company's choreographer, Angelin Preljocaj, the dance was called N, the simple letter that is the abbreviation for 'haine', the french word for hate. The dance enacts "hell on earth", according to Hentschlaeger, meaning "what happens when we lose control over our bodies." In accord with this theme, Hentschlaeger's first figurative animation paired real dancers with virtual bodies. In fact it was through the choreography that Hentschlaeger had come to know of the impetus for his future animated projections, and fittingly. For as any dancer can tell us, choreography demands that dancers submit to the designs of a tyrannical overseer, not succumb to a freer improvisation from within.

It was a new experience for Hentschlaeger to work with dancers, but not with human bodies. Throughout the 1990s, Hentschlaeger recorded and projected real human subjects representing a range of psychological and perceptual conditions that heighten our perception of the dehumanizing effects of media on modern life. With N, Hentschlaeger came back to representing bodies, but now they are virtual bodies, animations. The special effects of animation allow the artist to manipulate virtual bodies in ways not afforded to him by real living subjects photographed. In so doing, Hentschlaeger learned how the forces that he analogizes theatrically, in real life impact upon real bodies, while pushing, accelerating, intensifying the desired effects on these bodies in ways unacceptable in interactions with real subjects.

Hentschlaeger also has a media source for the floating bodies oeuvre. "In the research informing N," he told me, "I looked into computer game engines, which are the realtime animation software backbones of any computer game. I was particularly interested in shooter games and war simulators, for both their viscerally entertaining simulations of combat and killing, and for their banal brutality and mass slaughtering of virtual opponents from the comfort of one's chair. The plan was to use the realtime of such software as a model for interacting intuitively with a choreographer and dancers and to build on the virtual physics algorithms employed to create a more lifelike simulation of human motion."

"Unreal Tournament, the game engine I based my first floating bodies generation on, had one outstanding micro feature that caught my attention. On the death of 'a combatant', the body sinks to the ground, starts convulsing, jerking, and then dissolving into particles to instantly spawn a virtual reincarnation. It is upon having been killed in the game that I found the moment of 'losing control,' whereby the convulsing body drifts off, to be the only body that seems truly human and touching in an otherwise redundant, superficial world."

This convulsing, out-of-control body resurfaced unintentionally, and with "a spooky twist", a few years after, when, in one of Hentschlaeger's early immersive works using strobes and fog, the strobes triggered a participant's epileptic seizures due to his photosensitivity to light. In this sense, the loss of control was as much existentially forced on Hentschlaeger as it was an intended and continuous thread of both his figurative projection videos and his immersive environments, ZEE, where particpants must slowly feel their way through a thick mist. "When we find ourselves amid the synthetic mist and strobes of ZEE, we have the experience of losing all reference points perceptually, almost physically. I say almost physically because we retain the experience of feeling the floor beneath us, and the awareness of our own bodies, but little if anything else. We can't see or hear anything of substance. And then, there are those visitors who lose even these physical references and have to be ushered out of ZEE."

Whereas the immersive work imposes a substantial loss of perceptual and physical control, the projected virtual domain presents an analogical loss of control that tells us about art's propensity to reaffirm experience rather than to challenge it. Hentschlaeger admits that his fascination with the loss of control trauma links to a primal narcissistic injury inflicted on us despite all the insights, knowledge, efforts, accomplishments of our technologically-addicted civilization. "There is no way out of the basic human trajectory which always ends in our demise. I stick with my suspicion, that most of our technological obsession orbits around our desire for heightened control of our lives, specifically through attaining stability, longevity, and ultimately the promise of transcending (read: continuing) our destiny on this planet rather than in whatever mythological scenarios beyond."

"My life from early on was rich in death. When I was eight years old, my father died. Until I passed my father's age of death, I had no doubt that I wouldn't live long, and in hindsight I often behaved accordingly. I collected a fair share of near-death experiences on an almost regular basis during my twenties and thirties, some of which I still can't quite grasp why I survived them. In my feeling of living on the 'edge of a precipice,' I acutely remember feeling things being washed out of my hands, finding myself as much in an observer's position as struggling for a way out."

"All of this informs my early virtual bodies installations KARMA and FEED. For these, I developed virtual bodies that not only move and navigate entirely through convulsions, but also define the range of possible motions and aesthetics of the work. The result is a staged virtual black box lit by strobing virtual lights. The lights help us to visualize a zero gravity void in which a number of identical clone bodies seemingly interact without recognizing their respective body boundaries when they drift through each other like ghosts."

"After N, from KARMA and FEED on, each virtual body doubles as a sound instrument, creating and shaping sound through motion and changes in position in the zero gravity space. The greater the quantity of virtual bodies in the environment, the more complexly and richly the droning sound builds, creating a synchronized audio-visual impression."

"In 2008, I started a massive overhaul of the animation platform, having reached the limits of the Unreal software. The now finished instrument is allowing for more complexity as I move away from convulsions to focus on a more realistic interaction between individual bodies, swarm behavior, motion patterns, and an overall impression of ephemerality. CORE, the latest, most nuanced and symphonic work in the series, is realized with this platform. It is exceedingly more dynamic in both motion patterns and audio-visual rendering than my earlier works. Like CLUSTER, HIVE, and MATTER, from within the same work group, they are concerned with virtual embodiment of the fleeting, the immaterial, and the aether beyond matter."

The wide media range Hentschlaeger explores brings us to the issue of the audience's interaction with different media and their conventional genres. This is something artists have been doing on a grand scale in an art context since the Fluxus artists of the 1960s (and on a more modest scale since Dada), when kinetics, light, sound, music, performance, film, video, and audience participation extended the parameters of cultural experience. But with the advent of the digital New Media in the last twenty years, the component of audience interactivity--or what the New Media guru Lev Manovich calls The Myth of Interactivity -- has become the subject of scrutiny for being too vaguely conceptualized by artists and critics. And so there has been a push to further articulate the different interactive structures used in the new media object and experience. The trouble is, as Manovich has made much of, it is difficult to theoretically define and describe the user experience of interactive structures and the objects and images that facilitate them. Furthermore, the New Media artists' adoption of conventional media languages -- those of painting, sculpture, writing, theater, and cinema -- are then transposed by those artists insufficiently to digital productions. "There is a terminological confusion here," Hentschlaeger warns, "as most works tagged as 'interactive' should be rightfully labeled as 'reactive,' which points to a much more simple and rather mechanical process. What I'm saying is that I see interactivity as a complex, intelligent process, something alive, with a good amount of unpredictability and not necessarily an end or set time-space frame. This is what also makes any auratic art work interesting and truly interactive, in that it will trigger a personal response in the viewer, and for that matter as many possibly different responses as there are people in the audience. The response is not even limited to the time spent with the artwork, but can linger in memory and can color lives going forward, as with other intense experiences."

"Of course, the classic art-viewer interaction disallows feedback on, or changes to, the artwork. The beauty of this model is that compelling art is both radiant and static- hermetic. The viewer isn't expected to overtly, physically or dramatically interact with the art work, but enter a solemn, inner and often quite meditative process, in which the artwork, if attractive enough, is quietly devoured and fed into one's fabric of cultural experiences. I agree with Lev Manovich about The Myth of Interactivity, but I doubt that active user participation any day soon will evolve into something as meaningful as what we already have -- and that is a passive viewer/user participation. 'Interactivity' in media art comes with the Myth of Technology, the eternal promise of improving on nature. Short of true artificial intelligence, I don't see how enough intelligent complexity could be rendered to create truly interactive, rather than classically reactive work. We are a conscious, intelligent, sensual and emotional species and tend to get bored quickly because of that nature. To occupy our interest for a longer period of time, objects and processes are required to be challenging, ambiguous, enigmatic, and mysterious, if not mystical -- everything but mechanically predictable."

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/g-roger-denson/getting-to-the-core-of- ar_b_4342121.html MONA shines light into the darkness Debbie Cuthbertson June 17, 2013

Hobart's controversial art gallery pushes the boundaries with its inaugural winter festival, writes Debbie Cuthbertson. ''When you shut your eyes you will still be able to see.'' So says David Walsh, founder of Hobart's Museum of Old and New Art, of what he is trying to achieve through his inaugural winter arts festival, Dark Mofo, which lit up the city at the weekend. A different beast to the gambling millionaire's Mona Foma summer music festival, Dark Mofo takes the themes of sex and death so strongly identified with Walsh's $100 million museum and pushes them further: ''We let the mind's eye shine,'' he warns in the festival program. I didn't expect to experience that so literally, or viscerally. But lying on the floor of Austrian artist Kurt Hentschlager's installation Zee on Saturday, after passing out five minutes into the 12-minute piece and trying to understand the images that had flashed through my own mind's eye, it seems Walsh had hit his target. Anyone entering Hentschlager's work must sign a waiver and has ample warning of its potentially hallucinatory and dangerous effects. Part of Dark Mofo's visual arts program Beam In Thine Own Eye, housed in a former warehouse on Hobart's wharf, Zee is an aural and visual assault of strobe lights and sound in a room filled with fake fog. While the battery of lights seemed to have no effect on some, in others they provoke shaking, a loss of balance, hallucinations and in some cases (such as mine) what Hentschlager calls an emergency shutdown by the brain as it struggles to process the onslaught. Hentschlager said he had no way of predicting how individuals would react to his work. ''There's so many reactions. There are certain things that everybody experiences the same, certain frequencies of the light, the changes of the kaleidoscopic patterns … [Then] there are other things that are individually processed in your consciousness. ''It is very much to do with your emotional state: if you are calm, if you are agitated, if you have eaten … You are one of the people who can't deal with this sort of effect, this intensity,'' he tells me. Other elements of the program have a far more soothing presence, such as Japanese electronic artist Ryoji Ikeda's installation spectra [tasmania] - a grid of 49 searchlights shining from the city's cenotaph up to 15 kilometres into the sky. As it appeared at dusk on Friday night, showers conjured a rainbow that shimmered across it. Later, as the showers and cloud cleared, it became a solid, single, bright blue light piercing high up into the sky. The next evening, as the clouds sat low over the city, it took on a milky, translucent hue. An ever-evolving presence, it looks different every time you crane your neck to see how it has changed. Ikeda was at pains to spell out his efforts to minimise its power consumption, saying it used the equivalent energy of 10 households each night as it appeared from dusk until dawn. ''I'm not afraid of being hated. Even if they don't like this piece, people will never forget it. It is something in their life, just one single experience. They can keep it in their mind or their heart.'' Dark Mofo runs until June 23. Beam In Thine Own Eye runs until July 28. ! Abandon Normal Devices: Kurt Hentschläger The Austrian artist tells us about creating strange and mellow art for his latest installation and being inspired by techno clubs

Text: Simon Jablonski

Abandon Normal Devices in Liverpool stayed true to its name, showcasing an inspired selection films and visual art, amongst all the usual vices. With an emphasis on immersive experiences, events included a fantastical trip to the centre of the earth courtesy of by local legends Kazimier. Video artist Rachel Mayeri’s premiered her film made for and starring chimps, which screened alongside footage of chimps at Edinburgh zoo reacting to the film. Kurt Hentschläger’s installation ZEE threw unsuspecting viewers a death-like experience within a sublime fortress of colourful trauma.

Immersed in fog so thick you can’t see your outstretched hand, as patterns of light are hurled through the room implanting a series of abstract images in your mind’s eye as dull drones completely close off the world. If you subside your natural instinct to panic, the experience can be visionary, otherwise you’re stuck in a nightmare. Slightly shaken, Dazed Digital sat down with Austrian artist Kurt Hentschläger to talk about punk, hallucinations and visions.

Dazed Digital: What was the inspiration behind this piece? Kurt Hentschlager : I’m so freakin’ old now, I come from the original punk days. It was always about creating this enormous intensity for like a weekend, that informed my entire career as an artist. Now I have so extremely mellowed out, this piece is from the mellow me. Now I’m more drawn to loop based drone music that build up layers of sonic masses that you could just bathe in. One of the inspirations was in the basement of this huge techno club in Brussels, literally one strobe going on and the place packed with fog so you couldn’t see anything, it was so great.

DD: What does the excessive fog bring to the experience? Kurt Hentschlager : Fog is a means of cutting you off from your normal ways of sensing and orientating yourself. We live be clear visual and sonic cues of how we situate ourselves in conjunction with the world and with other people. So the fog takes all this away, you can’t judge distance anymore, not just visually but it muffles everything. So all of a sudden the world collapses onto yourself.

DD: Have you been working on similar installations for a while? Kurt Hentschlager : We did a lot of audio-visual performances in a time where there wasn’t much of it around. We had a sequence of screens and surround sound, et cetera. It was very brutal, like pounding the audience into submission. It was monstrous bass. We had 15 thousand watts of sub bass, some parts had 20. I still keep meeting people sometimes who say they remember my hair standing up and my whole body pounding.

DD: Do you get people coming out claiming to have had strange visions? Kurt Hentschlager : Yes absolutely, people talk about things they’ve seen that obviously weren’t there. I’ve had people come out and think they’ve been talking to a friend, but their friend had left long before. In some people it really instils a minor hallucination, it kind of animates the brain. I think it does set in an emotional process. First of all you don’t understand what you’re seeing, but because we are hard wired to survive, you have to somehow manoeuvre and navigate. On a rational basis you understand that it’s a benign thing; that Vikings won’t start slaughtering you once you get to the front or something, but still something in our brain kicks in and tells you this is unsafe.

DD: How did you see the relationship between the sound and visuals? Kurt Hentschlager : It is a composed, willed sound. In the old days my problem was sound is 3D and video is flat. With this piece the visual experience is hyper 3D surround and starts from within you, there’s no distinction between the inside and the outside and the sound is 2D, it’s very interesting.

DD: Is this a new way of gaining an hallucinogenic experience? Kurt Hentschlager : I hope not, that would be so sad. What I used to like about psychedelic drugs is that you could not switch them off, you had to go there, there’s no escape. So of course, if it’s not a good time it’s horrible, you’re out of control. We use technology as a major means of our civilisation to assert control of the environment, to help us shield from nature, from all the things we’re not in control of, so it’s a desperate means of getting a sense of stability, and we succeeded to a certain extent to do that.

DD: Have you had any strange experiences in the installation yourself? Kurt Hentschlager : I’ve had two very spooky experiences. I was in Sao Paulo before the opening. I was in there tuning the room by myself and all of a sudden I started shivering, it was so eerie, it felt like some presence was there. I’m sure there was no presence whatsoever, I’m not a mystic.

Source: http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/11686/1/abandon-normal- devices-kurt-hentschlager PAULJOHNWHITE'S BLOG Artist Reseach: The Uncanny

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Kurt%Hentschläger:%ZEE

Kurt Hentschläger is an artist known for immersive installations that have been likened to “entering Heaven” or “a walk-in hallucination”. Hentschläger has spent a lifetime creating artworks that push the viewer into a state of sensory overload. ZEE is no exception. As one visitor put it: “It is really hard to say something smart about something so sensual”. Variously described as “insane”, “like entering Heaven” and “another planet”, ZEE is an installation of fog, light and sound that will transform Gallery 1 at FACT into an out of body experience. An installation “like death” that has audiences struggling to believe the evidence of their senses, this manifestation of Hentschläger’s distinct and mind-altering artwork is a UK first.

Due to the sometimes disorienting nature of ZEE, suspended ropes are on hand to guide first timers through the installation. Visitors are nevertheless free to roam the exhibition space if they wish.

“…this is the world as viewed by a dying robot clone from the inside of a Turner landscape painting

http://www.fact.co.uk/about/exhibitions/2011/abandon-normal-devices- at-fact/gallery-1-zee

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Follow Related Follow Zee at Abandon Normal Devices admin | October 6, 2011

How do you describe the indescribable? Entering Gallery 1 at FACT in Liverpool, the only nugget of information I could recall from the guidebook was “hold on to the rope”. Moments later this instruction would suddenly make a lot of sense. The moment our guide opened the door and set our group of 12 loose into a dense fog, my right arm automatically reached out and groped for that all-important rope. I’d entered Zee – part of Abandon Normal Devices.

The fog was so dense that I couldn’t see anything beyond 2 inches from my eyes. With nothing specific to view, no point of reference, entering Kurt Hentschlager’s Zee instantly immersed me into a piece of his art. I was in the art. I was the art. Take one room, add some fog and some continually changing strobe lights, sprinkle it with a low-toned musical piece and you have Zee. It sounds simple enough, so what makes this such a popular exhibition? Zee strips away the conceptions of looking at art and makes you the central piece. In that room with 11 other people for 12 minutes, you are completely alone.

The strobe lights flashed slowly to begin with as I fumbled to find the rope. I slowly began to make my way around the room. As the minutes ticked by, the strobe lights intensified in speed and colour. Patterns flashed across my eyes. The music volume increased. My heart rate escalated. My palms became sweaty. My steps became more disjointed. I lost the rope. I was panicking.

But why was I so nervous? There was only one door in the square room so I couldn’t get lost. There were 11 other people in there so I wasn’t alone. But that is how I felt – lost and alone. Bewildered. I suddenly felt myself between life and death. I had my memories – and the most frightening ones that had been so neatly covered up – were now being peeled away by the fog. Nervous glances over my shoulder. Quick gasps for breath. Awaiting the moment of death.

The lights turned to a continuous white glare. The music stopped. Our guide announced our 12 minutes were up. It was over.

Outside in the relative safety of the gallery, I turned to my companion whose face mirrored my own. As clichéd as it sounds we both felt as though we’d been reborn. You go into the room one person, and you come out another. When your fixed points are taken away from you, you come face to face with your own vulnerability.

Zee by Kurt Hentschlager is part of the Abandon Normal Devices Festival at FACT in Liverpool. 29 September – 27 November. words Amy Ellen

Source: http://www.fluxmagazine.com/index.php/arts/zee-at-abandon-normal-devices/ Excerpt from Gunnar Schmidt: "Weiche Displays. Projektionen auf Rauch,Wolken und Nebel" ("Soft Displays. Projections on smoke, clouds and mist"). Publisher: Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin, 2011

Mike Stubbs and Omar Kholeif, FACT, Liverpool 2011

“Abandon Normal Devices”

ZEE is an artwork that invites the gallery visitor to enter a space, which is both immersive and abstract.

As the viewer has very little to ʻviewʼ in the traditional sense - there are no points of reference, nothing representational, no object - the viewer becomes a participant in an experience that is stimulated by light. By creating this condition and controlling the spatial environment, the artist Kurt Hentschläger gives us the opportunity to feel ʻbeingʼ in ourselves - bringing our consciousness to the fore.

Kurt Hentschläger has been fascinated with creating immersive and overwhelming experiences since the early 1990s, experimenting with extreme sub-sonics and large video projections. In 1998 Granular Synthesis, Kurtʼs partnership with Ulf Langheinrich, performed Modell 5 a monumental multi-screen audio-visual performance at Liverpoolʼs Cream as part of ISEA (International Symposium of Electronic Arts).

Following an abstract tradition, ZEE might even be said to reference one of the most important abstract painters, the early twentieth century Russian artist Kazimir Severinovich Malevich, whose best-known paintings White on White or Black on Black confounded audiences in denying representational forms. At the time, the work was highly political as it rejected previous narratives, which had either been romantic or propagandistic. One of Malevichʼs famous quotes flamboyantly dismisses colour. His work deployed an ultra - minimal style and a palette restricted to black and white in the period leading up to the Russian Revolution.

“I have established the semaphore of Suprematism. I have beaten the lining of the coloured sky, torn it away and in the sack that formed itself, I have put colour and knotted it. Swim! The free white sea, infinity, lies before you.” - Malevich In the context of ZEE, Malevichʼs statement encourages the abandonment of assumptions and normality - wholly appropriate for the context of Abandon Normal Devices, which this year is themed around the complexities of personal and institutional systems of belief.

What is belief? It can be a documentary view of a fledgling reality – or even a life, or in the case of ZEE, a confrontation that strips away our sense of comfort and reference. It is a potent reminder that when the identifiable is removed the only thing that we are left with is ourself.

! artengine blog: art and technological experimentation

Elektra 12, Montreal: Playing with your senses

By Jaenine Parkinson

The best thing that Elektra had to offer was Kurt Hentschlager’s FEED—and they know it. It ran almost every night, sometimes twice in one night, and has been shown at five previous Elektra festivals. It is a work in two halves and the second half completely overshadows the first. So much so that until I came to write this I had almost forgotten about the first part: a projection of a featureless computer generated male body floating and replicating in a black void. Except for serving as a warning of how we might soon feel, I saw no real connection between this projection and what followed. And what followed was awesome.

I will never capture the experience in words. Every person I spoke to had a different impression. Before going in we all had to sign waiver forms acknowledging that we had read the warnings about how overwhelming the experience could be. No wonder the projection was so forgettable, we were all sitting there waiting for the pandemonium to begin. It was well worth the wait.

Theatrical fog flooded the room. I immediately began to assume that we are going to see something akin to a 1960‘s Expanded Cinema event, maybe with lasers if we were lucky. But the fog got so thick that the possibility of seeing anything was quickly ruled out. I couldn’t see my hand when it was right in front of my face nor could I tell if my eyes were open or closed. A strobe started up with accompanying pulsating sounds, and then the magic began. Rainbow colored vortexes and shimmering diagonal grids appeared, not in-front but inside my eyes. It was like an sober psychedelic experience. The scientists call these visions phosphenes. They are formed between the retina, as it is bombarded by light, and the visual cortex, as it strains to see something in the fog. You can approximate the FEED experience by pressing on your eyes or, of course, by taking hallucinogenics. Although it is more like the latter because you can always stop pressing your eyes at any moment and release yourself from the sensation. You can’t escape Feed. It is engulfing and can become quite claustrophobic.

Typical phosphene forms

At a few stages I had the urge to get up and move around, to feel untethered from three dimensional space like the faceless man in the prelude. Undoubtedly, that would be a heath and safety disaster. The bureaucratic mindset that had us signing liability release forms wouldn’t want us crashing into, vomiting over, or passing out on each other.

When the strobes began I was quite relaxed; the rhythm created through light and sound was temperate. With hindsight, Hentschlager was just easing us into it. The intensity heightened. He is obviously aware of, and manipulating, a correlation between the frequencies he could generate and naturally occurring frequencies in the human body like heart beats and brain waves. Hentschalger was playing our senses like they were dials on a synthesizer.

Previous discussions of FEED, which has been shown around the world, talk about it as fusing the human and machine providing a vision of our cyborg future. I can’t help but channel Lev Manovich and Donna Harraway here and argue that Feed also provides a vision of our cyborg past and present. Renaissance perspectival machines harnessed and manipulated the properties of binocular vision. Cinema (and its various Victorian fairground precursors) works because our brains see movement when shown rapidly succeeding images. To be quite literal about it, all technology is just that – an extension and enhancement of human capabilities. We have been and always will be cyborgs.

!

San Francisco Chronicle

Art that causes pain Kenneth Baker Sunday, November 23, 2008

Most critics, including me, spend much of their allotted space discussing the pleasures of art - of observation, of recognition, of making connections. But what about the pain?

Some people skirt contemporary art because it occasionally appears to treat its audience aggressively, even abusively.

I am thinking not of the nearly unendurable tedium of Matthew Barney's cinematic epics, for example, but of effects deliberately conceived and contrived to unnerve.

David Hammons' New York gallery show of a huge, empty space in total darkness, with only a tiny blue LED for each visitor, comes to mind. So does Alfredo Jaar's "Lament of the Images" (2002), in which, after reading three brief historical texts by David Levi

Strauss concerning the whiting out of information, viewers rounded a corner to confront a wall of light whose intensity seemed tolerable at first, but before long drove one from the room.

For an example closer to home, recall the frigid room in which Olafur Eliasson displayed an ice-bound BMW during his 2007-08 retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of

Modern Art.

While a certain public will watch slasher movies with relish, visitors to art venues apparently come more often seeking aesthetic equivalents of consolation or, in today's mass-marketed museum realm, the feeling of plugging into cultural celebrity.

But for much of the 20th century, artists who styled themselves avant-garde, and even some who didn't, devised means to derange the expectations and sensibilities of observers in the name of a disillusioning modernity, of social revolution or just pure orneriness. But with the avant-garde behind us, as nearly everyone acknowledges it is, what excuses remain for artists contriving the shocks to the psyche and senses that we occasionally encounter in contemporary art?

Two fresh examples that I happened to experience in Pittsburgh last month linger vividly in memory. The more intense of the two, "Zee" (2008) by Austrian Kurt Hentschläger, defies reproduction. It occupies, through December, the Wood Street Galleries in downtown Pittsburgh, a project of the nonprofit Pittsburgh Cultural Trust.

Arriving from street level by elevator, the visitor to "Zee" enters a dimly lighted foyer with two doors in the wall opposite an attendant's desk. Visitors wearing pacemakers or known to have respiratory problems, epilepsy or migraines are discouraged from entering the piece, and wisely so. The drone of sound from within the installation muffles conversation even among people standing just outside it.

Inside, all utterances drown in waves of pulsing, enveloping sound. Although I could hear other people shouting to one another inside "Zee," I could not tell whether they succeeded in communicating.

The visitor to "Zee" enters through a narrow vestibule, brightly lighted and suffused with a thin, nearly odorless fog. Open the door to the main space and the fog confronts you as a permeable plenum. Once one enters it, the only sources of orientation are the feeling of the floor underfoot and a waist-level rope that, one is assured beforehand, circuits the space and eventually leads to the exit.

In a matter of seconds, the strobe light and drubbing sound that pervade the fog overwhelm all other sensations, and even memory, inducing an almost sickening sense of imprisonment in immediacy. Did Hentschläger have "the fog of war" in mind? It certainly seems a pertinent association.

The sole compensation for this immersion is hallucinations - or so they seemed to me - of faintly pulsing kaleidoscopic geometry, fugitive crystalline figures that seemed to come from behind one's eyes.

What a relief when the door handle at the exit finally materializes just beyond the rope's end.

The reward for this ordeal became apparent only when I returned to street level and daylight: Suddenly, everything took on an astonishing clarity and definition. My eyes recoiled from the strange mingling of overload and deprivation in "Zee" to experiencing ordinary vision as purified and miraculous, the doors of perception cleansed, as commended by William Blake.

Hentschläger's piece, in other words, delivered literally on the hackneyed promise that art will refashion one's way of seeing the world. The effect lasted only a few minutes, but it was as unforgettable as the ordeal that engendered it.

"Gravity of Light" (2008), a powerful installation by Doug and Mike Starn, relied on more conceptual justification for its sometimes painful intensity. Another event under the auspices of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, "Gravity of Light" occupied for three weeks a derelict industrial space known as the Pipe Building.

Here visitors had to put on safety glasses before entering the long, run-down vacant space. Deep shadows added to the difficulty of walking over a pitted brick and sand floor.

A single light source - but what a light source - stood high at the far end of the space: a carbon arc lamp flickering, at its brightest, with the equivalent of 50,000 watts of electric light. It was as if a small star had somehow made its way indoors.

In the bays of the factory walls, the Starns hung seven of their very large composite photographs - the smallest measuring more than 12 by 8 feet - printed on friable-looking, but quite stable, gampi or Thai mulberry paper. The largest image describes at colossal scale a statue of the blind eighth century Buddhist monk Ganjin. He personifies the immemorial metaphoric association of light with insight. Other images, representing earlier Starn projects, included moths, denuded trees and immensely magnified leaves decayed to a lacework of veins and stems.

These elements coalesced into a mute meditation on light, time, growth and decay. The carbon arc, painful even to glance at but fascinating in the purity, intensity and immediacy of the light it shed, acted as translator. It translated into physical sensations the pictures' symbolism of our ambivalence toward growth and our own embeddedness in nature. {sbox}

E-mail Kenneth Baker at [email protected]. http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/11/23/PK7H13S8TU.DTL

This article appeared on page N - 40 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Mind Altering to Say the Least

Barton McLean

I knew that something was going to be different when I observed that every fourth person in the audience of this small Playhouse on the Rennselaer Polytecnic Institute campus in Troy, New York, at an event on Nov. 17, 2006, was an EMPAC staff member dressed in uniform, and was informed that they were there in case an audience member had an epileptic seizure and was forced to be carried out of the room through fog so thick that you could not see the hand in front of your face.

Little did I realize that this event would be a defining one for me, comparable only to my first encounter with electronic music 40 years ago. Kurt Hentschläger, audiovisual composer of the this event called “Feed,” opened a door to the heretofore blocked recesses of my subconscious mind, evoking in brilliant color stunning visual patterns through the use of a combination of intense granular soundscape, stroboscopic light and artificial fog.

The defining aspect of this for me (and for most other audience members) was that this heretofore unseen kaleidoscopic display of pattern, beauty, shape, movement, pulse, and texture was being produced, not by the artist directly (although certainly he was in control of the experience), but BY MY OWN BRAIN.

The work is presented in traditional proscenium protocol, with some pretty hefty tech requirements – specs that are rarely seen in the USA in my own twenty years of full time touring experience: 5000 ansi lumens video projector, 8 channels of sound @ 400 watts/channel, with a 5000 watt subwoofer, 10 Martin “Atomic 3000” stroboscopes (2 independent pulsing circuits of 5 each) 5 color change units for the strobes, and 36 PAR wide beam stage lights. All strobes and lighting are of extremely high intensity, using a total of 50 thousand watts. I present these specs to emphasize how totally immersive this experience is. Hentschlager beams the bright spots and strobes into the fog surrounding the audience, so the audience is totally deprived of all sensory information except the music and the bright lights and colored pulsing, often at different speeds with relation to each other. In my exhaustive interview with Kurt, available in PDF download at his web site at http://www.hentschlager.info/portfolio/feed/pdf/SEAMUS_Journal_Interview.pdf he touches on how he achieves this unusual effect:

“According to my research … what happens is a clash between the internal brain refresh cycle (of the visual processing parts of the brain) and the external flicker cycles of the stroboscopes. Once the fog part is under way, the strobes fade in at about 8hz, from there, until the end of the piece, they go up to a maximum of about 24hz. Normally, at the beginning of the fog part, people in the audience will, in terms of brain refresh cycles, have arrived in an alpha state, their brain individually refreshing in between 8-13hz. Now two things seem to happen, A) Generally, stroboscopic flicker in a range between 8-13Hz appears to break down some of the physiological barriers between different regions of the brain and B) The (external) flicker rates of the strobes interfere with the (internal) brain refresh rates of the visual cortex resulting in actual interference patterns. These 2D/3D psychedelic patterns, experienced in such an environment, are differing from individual to individual depending on the respective personal brain refresh rate and other factors linked to imaginative and other predispositions.

The intensity of the patterns changes according to increase / decrease in light intensity of the strobes- and the flicker frequency. It also changes with the intersected pulse lights, which temporarily subdue and reignite the impression. Feed uses two independent sections of strobes, which, when set to differing frequencies, creating interference on their own, all of which is constantly “frustrating” the brain’s attempt to properly “see” and thus constantly animating the brain to ever new interpretations of the reality at hand.

Generally the brighter the flicker and the more filling one’s entire field of view, the more instantly the patterns emerge. This relies for the most part on the very dense fog, which erases any idea of physical space, depth of space and resets one’s sense of orientation. The fog really brings the flicker to the plane of the retina, allowing no distance or escape from it, the eye is reduced to a basic brightness-, contrast- and color sensor, all the perceived patterns then being “invented” in brain.

I worked with flicker in my video work for about 6 years in an attempt to at least somewhat lifting the video off the flat screen and have it pulsating in space. The light element of video becomes equally prominent when using flicker, but still the inherent flatness of projected video remained a source of frustration.”

“Feed” is in two parts. It begins with floating protohuman androgynous figures suspended in space, gradually changing position and multiplying, all controlled in real time by Hentschlager, and generated live in sync with the evocative and haunting sound track comprising granular synthesis techniques and software, and all well documented in Hentschlager’s web site at http://www.hentschlager.info Eventually, as this progresses with its exquisite sense of timelessness, the fog commences, and a gradual transition to the second part described above ensues. At the end of “Feed,” one is totally drained, exhilarated, and energized. I leave with the thought that here is an artist who can be so selfless as to expend so much of his treasure as to empower all of us to reach such a height of artistic experience. Perhaps this is the essence of a creative being. Kurt Hentschläger is a New York-based Austrian artist working in the realm of sound, video, and other media. His sound work often centers on granular synthesis. “Feed” was premiered at the Venice Theater Biennial

Even before the massive EMPAC (Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center who produced this event) has been completed, it is already producing events of an elegance and sophistication rarely seen in the USA, and will eventually be comparable only to entities such as IRCAM inParis when it is completed and in full operation next year (http://empac.rpi.edu). FEED, VISIBLE SPACE COLLAPSE 08/17/2007 07:51 PM

FEED,

VISIBLE SPACE COLLAPSE Txt: Marco Mancuso

Feed, an audiovisual performance on sensorial, spatialized, electronic experimentation produced by austrin artist Kurt Hentschlager ( for the ones that don't know him, he, together with Ulf Langheinrich, is one of the two souls of Granular Synthesis) is, at this time, a project that is unique in its genre, outside of the aesthetic and technical languages currently spoken in the contemporary world of performances and multimedia installations. There's really nothing to discuss: opinions are in total accordance among audience and critics.

Whoever was able to "experience" Feed (experience: this is its main significance) truly knows what I'm talking about. Designed for the Biennale di Teatro di Venezia in 2005, passed through Netmage in 2006 and replicated many times all over the world up to its arrival, a short time ago, to the Sonar festival in Barcelona , Feed is the artistic and research project effectively enclosing the whole of the path, ideas, theories of one of the pioneers of the aesthetic and sensorial research on the relationships intercurring between sound and images.

Feed is, in todays panorama, the artistic project that can represent a "reference model" and a "change in direction" of a whole scene, the multimedia audio-visual art scene. A scene that has not yet developed the potential offered by human interaction, and that can start to investigate, through Kurt Hentschlager's project, on the physical- sensorial-perceptive relationships that artists can create between the work of art and the audience. Because Feed is an artistic project offered in the form of a live performance playing on the loss of the usual physicl-spatial coordinates, on the continuous sollicitation of the retina and on the direct relation that it bears to specific areas of the human brain, on the multisensorial, synesthetic approach to sound and 2D/3D patterns that are autonomously created by any single object present in the performance, on the physical-sensorial immersivity and on the resulting emotional stimulation, deriving from direct experience and by the direct establishment of a correspondence between our body and technology.

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In the end, Feed "simply" is an experience to be had, to be lived, to be used to be able to allow ourselves to be astonished by our own reactions when faced with precise stimuli. I had the chance of directly talking to Kurt Hentschlager in occasion of the Elektra festival in Montreal, and many were the questions that, inevitably, rose after the performance. Sit down, relax, wait until the digital sound rises in volume, and when smoke starts to rapidly fill the room, until you can't see anything, just relax, let yourselves go to the loss of any three-dimensional perception of teh space surrounding you, and look around: the stroboscopic lights will wrap the space beside you with a blinding, flashing white light, nd beautiful 2D and 3D patterns will appear in front of you without the slightest effort. From then on it will be we and astonishment, for more that 20 (really too short) minutes...

Marco Mancuso: Would you like to tell me the concept behind Feed project? We discussed in Montreal about the relationship between sound, light, audience physical perception, loose of tridimensional space. And we spoke about the way of relationship and signal neural trasmission beetween our retina and images in specific areas of our brain....

Kurt Hentschlager: Its probably fair to say, that Feed covers in one piece all the subject matter that aesthetically and psychologically has interested me over time. Its at once a summary of my long term research into immersion and audiovisual composition, both in terms of installation and performance, as well as an outlook of where I'd like to venture from here.

The piece has 2 parts, seemingly the opposite of each other, the first one being classically frontal, a cinematic experience in the widest of senses, non narrative (or barely so), displaying a kind of sinister ballet of convulsing and sounding 3D bodies. The second part then is the moment when the perception of space, and for that matter the classical cinematic set, vanishes in an instant, wiped out by a massive injection of artificial fog. The video projection is replaced by stroboscopic flicker and pulse lights, creating an impression of complete immersion, a collapse of visible space and a familiar sense of perception. .

While the sound-scape of the first part is mostly emanating from the motions of the 3D characters on screen, in the second part it originates from the lights, from acoustic and solar pick ups channeled through a chain of effects and feedback. I try to create an equivalent in sound to the sublime quality of the tripping interferences phenomena in the second part.

Its hard to describe what one actually sees in the strobo-fog part, it also differs from person to person and it certainly can't be documented with a video camera. I love that because I always find this to be one of the major frustrations, the need for documentation of ephemeral and for that matter physical events, something that should be http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=927 Page 2 of 6 FEED, VISIBLE SPACE COLLAPSE 08/17/2007 07:51 PM

experienced by putting one self right into the event, but for many, e.g. historical, reasons is documented and in the form of its documentation becomes something very different. So the second part of Feed is not documentable, because the visual impression unfolding is rendered in the brain, its not really seen, even though one seems to "see" it. Or rather, what's actually seen through the eye and fed into the visual cortex is straight and "flat" high contrast flicker while the psychedelic 2D/3D patterns and whatever else individual members of the audience believe to be "seeing" is visualized inside our brain.

According to my research - which by no means is exhaustive - what happens is a clash between the internal brain refresh cycle (of the visual processing parts of the brain) and the external flicker cycles of the stroboscopes. Once the fog part is under way, the strobes fade in at about 8hz, from there, until the end of the piece, they go up to a maximum of about 25hz. Normally, at the beginning of the fog part, people in the audience will, in terms of brain refresh cycles, have arrived in an alpha state, their brain, or more specifically their visual cortex, individually refreshing in between 8-13hz. Now two things seem to happen, A) Generally, stroboscopic flicker in a range between 8-13Hz appears to break down some of the physiological barriers between different regions of the brain and B) The (external) flicker rates of the strobes interfere with the (internal) brain refresh rates of the visual cortex resulting in actual interference patterns. These 2D/3D psychedelic patterns, experienced in such an environment, are differing from individual to individual depending on the respective personal brain refresh rate and other factors linked to imaginative and other predispositions.

The intensity of the patterns changes according to increase / decrease in light intensity of the strobes-, the flicker frequency and flash duration - all of which I am actually improvising with in the show. It also changes with the intersected pulse lights, which temporarily subdue and reignite the impression. Feed uses two independent sections of strobes, which, when set to differing frequencies, are creating interferences on their own, all of which is constantly “frustrating” the brain's attempt to properly “see” and thus constantly animating the brain to ever new interpretations of the reality at hand.

Generally the brighter the flicker and the more filling one's entire field of view, the more instantly the patterns emerge. This relies for the most part on the very dense fog, which erases any idea of physical space, depth of space and resets one's sense of orientation. The fog really brings the flicker to the plane of the retina, allowing no distance or escape from it, the eye is reduced to a basic brightness-, contrast- and color sensor, all the perceived patterns then being “invented” in brain.

Marco Mancuso: When and how do you decide to start working on Feed? Of course, is a step of your wide

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research on audiovisual synesthesia and immersivity with new electronic artforms you started with Granular Synthesis. In the same time, it seems to be a step over, something on the border between the emotive and the physical experience.

Kurt Hentschlager: I experimented with flicker in my video and sound work with for about 6 years in an attempt to at least somewhat lifting video off the flat screen and have it visually reverberating in space. The element of light in video becomes equally prominent when using flicker, but still the inherent flatness of projected video remained a source of frustration.

The idea to work with fog and strobes goes back to a couple of intense experiences in fog, both up in the mountains, where walking into a bank of clouds on an otherwise sunny day leads one into this evenly lit serene moment of peace and beauty, but also finding myself in a hard core techno club in Brussels sometime in the early nineties, which was just packed with fog. Like ever and so often with ideas, I carried this one around for a few years before I eventually found the right moment to get to it. Ordered a fog machine, hooked up my existing strobes and started working, most of it empirical in nature in my studio. I was quite thrilled from the beginning, to see that my imagination was surpassed by the early results. From there, through a series of tests and sequences, I started building a vocabulary, which I continue expanding upon. I feel this is still very much in progress and will become a bigger body of work.

Feed was a creation for the Theater Biennial in Venice in 2005 and fittingly it does stage "humans", well humanoid 3D puppets, in its first part. Even in that first part its all about the void and I mean it less in terms of the bodies inhabiting what could be interpreted as dark interstellar space, but more in the sense of their complete isolation. They appear to be a group, but they neither can see each other, nor vaguely are aware of each other, their bodies going through each other as if all of them were ghosts. So the second part of Feed in a way does reflect this virtual setup of the first part in the physical audience space. Wherein the physical space collapses to a void, kind of turns outside > in. And its not even scary... but rather contemplative.

Marco Mancuso: In Montreal, you told that you worked with scientists and neuro-psychiatrists, to understand which are the effects of strobo-lights, smog and sounds on our perception. You told me that you studied a lot, you browse the internet, you read many books. Could you tell me which were the references of your work, and how was to work with these scientists and psychitrists?

Kurt Hentschlager: Actually I haven't worked with neurologists yet, but obviously done quite a bit of reading in an effort to understand the process inside the human brain and also the very possible side effects on some people, especially in regard to what is called photo sensitive epilepsy. For photosensitive people, flicker can induce effects ranging from nausea to short term unconsciousness & memory loss and seizures. So these are serious side effects albeit for a very select few people. They are of a benign nature and ephemeral but nevertheless disturbing for anybody experiencing them. A few such incidents have occurred in Feed shows and so a modus operandi has been established providing information and warning for the audience, guides inside and outside the performance space, first aid team etc.

There is a perfect introduction on the topic in a book called “Chapel of the Extreme Experience - A short history of Stroboscopic Flicker and the Dream Machine” by John Geiger, Soft Skull Press. it looks at the scientific flicker findings from the 1950-70ies from an art perspective in reference to beatnik, psychedelic culture and flicker film, highly recommend it. Another one I like is "A brief tour of human consciousness" by V.S. Ramachandran, Pi Press. This one looks at how the brain can create illusions and delusions, synesthesia and its relation to metaphor and art, by analyzing and locating processes in the brain by studying defects in the perception of neurological patients.

http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=927 Page 4 of 6 FEED, VISIBLE SPACE COLLAPSE 08/17/2007 07:51 PM

Marco Mancuso: Which are the Feed hysorical, scientific and art references from the past? In other words, are there some other artistic or scientific projects from the past which inspired your work?

Kurt Hentschlager: I think if anything then structural film, like Paul Sharits, Tony Konrad and Peter Kubelka are an obvious reference. I saw many of those experimental films back at the end of the 70ies but really for the most part forgot about them. Once I rediscovered flicker as something that emerged within the software video sampler that Ulf and I developed in 1997, I went back and looked at some of those films again. Paul Sharits work thankfully had a kind of a revival in the beginning of this decade

Also come to think of it, as a young artist I was seriously intrigued by the op art work of the hungarian painter Viktor Vasarely, the work he did in the 80ies, he was considered to be almost a kitsch artist, or rather he was too pop, I went to his museum in Budapest and remember being mesmerized.

Marco Mancuso: Finally, I was speaking in Montreal with Scanner about the actual need/change of live electronic performances and installations, to be not focused on impressive audiovisual fluxus, but more on an emotive dialogue with the audience, on physical immersivity, on loose of perception, on concepts and deep messages too. Electronic live art passed on many changes in the last years, and now with new tools, softwares and devices, with a direct dialogue between art, communication and commercial, Tv, mobile and Internet, many people and professionists become "artists". What do you think about this expecially speaking about Feed?

Kurt Hentschlager: I feel pretty much the same, my fatigue with some of electronic sound and art is that it often relies so much on the sensation of its technological advances that the “art” part seems to become negligible. There is a clear hierarchy established e.g. in the term “new media art” – first there is the “new”, then the “media”, finally at the end comes the “art”. This is telling. The formal aspect of it becomes dominant and acts like a facade in front of an otherwise inexistent building. There generally seems to be some confusion in terms of terminology, a lot of cultural expression today is labeled as art while in essence its really design or applied art. And yes there are blurry borders but still, its not the same.

I look at media as an extension of our body or better our sensory and communication organs. Because it's that close to us we are connecting to it on a deeper level, are emotionally involved and extensively mirroring ourselves in it. My work is informed by this relationship, in particular by the feedback loop within our very core, being both the creators and consumers of technology and media. This interests me for the longest of time not the least because of the fair amount of denial and propaganda surrounding it. http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=927 Page 5 of 6 Am Abgrund der Schönheit Hubert Salden, 19.09.07

In einem in den Berg geschlagenen Stollen des Linzer Aktienkellers kommt an drei Festivalabenden "FEED" zur Aufführung. Das Werk von Kurt Hentschläger schiebt den virtuellen Raum auf der Leinwand in den realen Raum. In den ersten Minuten schwebt die animierte Figur eines Mannes in schwereloser Umgebung auf der Projektionsfläche. Die Vertrautheit zu der Figur auf der Leinwand baut sich über Gesten auf, die sich zeitlos einer unbestimmten Umwelt öffnen, konvulsivisch zucken oder sich zurücknehmen. Die Figur ist ohne Gesicht und Körperöffnungen und beginnt bald darauf, sich zu vervielfältigen, doch die Vielen nehmen einander nicht wahr. Unverbunden ziehen sie in einem offenen System an stroboskopischen Spots entlang, die auf sie gerichtet sind. Nach etwa 15 Minuten füllt sich der Raum im Stollen in hoher Geschwindigkeit mit Nebel. Eine Spiegelung findet statt. Die Betrachtenden finden sich allein vor und selbst in die Position der animierten Figur versetzt.

Der Nebel ist dreidimensionaler Bild- und Kommunikationsträger und umfängt alle Betrachtenden. Jede vertraute Wahrnehmung der Umgebung ist entzogen. Die Zeit verliert ihre Bestimmbarkeit und wirkt verinnerlichend; ein zusätzlich skulptural eingesetztes Material sind die bis zur Schmerzgrenze anschwellenden Töne. In der extremen Lautstärke erfahren sich die Teilnehmenden als überwältigt in einer abstrakten Landschaft und der Eindruck des Erhabenen entsteht. Die Komposition des Wahrnehmungsraums ist durch serielle Stroboskop-Blitze moduliert. Durch die millionenfache Brechung trägt der Nebel das Licht dicht an die Augen der Betrachtenden und diese beginnen, Interferenzmuster zu sehen. Das Innere und ihre Entkörperlichung wird dabei entweder als in die Weite ausgreifend erfahren oder aber mit Angst assoziiert.

Die Extremsituation, die "FEED" hervorruft, wird zum Tasten an den psychisch-physischen Grenzen des Menschen. Die Sinne, die Gefühle, die Intuition, das Vorfinden und Assoziieren bauen Sinn an den äußersten Ausläufern des Terrains auf, das wir gerade noch an der Grenze zu einer Intensität an Helligkeit und Lautstärke ertragen können, zu der uns der Zugang ansonsten verschlossen ist. So nähern wir uns dem Abgrund von Erschaffung und Vernichtung - von Wolken umfangen, wie sie hoch oben im Gebirge erlebt werden können - und erleben Momente von Frieden und Schönheit.

Interview with Barton McLean on FEED in the Seamus Journal: The Journal of the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States

HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE CHARACTERIZED IN THE REVIEW? MEDIA ARTIST? EXPLORER OF THE SUBCONSCIOUS MIND? ETC. ETC. WHAT KIND OF LABEL(S) WOULD FIT?

Just artist would be fine, audiovisual composer would fit too. I was drawn to the arts because the field generally seemed to stand for an interdisciplinary approach. In doubt I am a generalist, rather than an expert in just one particular area. I think part of an artists identity is to build up and combine various skills, both in understanding one’s environment as well as in producing work reflecting on such environment. The term media artist in that respect feels too narrow. It’s based on technology hype and I have come to increasingly dislike it. Artists always worked with media. Over time, media come and go and are added to the fabric of society and the tool set of cultural production. I do believe however that in a time of technological breakthroughs, like we are living in, it’s crucial to be literate about technology. This is in order to stay in tune with the world, while equally increasing one’s capabilities. The question here is one of balance, the term “new media art”, which is often used describing art work based on cutting edge technology, establishes a fatal hierarchy, first comes the “new”, then the “media” and last we find the somewhat anemic “art”. I for one believe that cultural production is about an emotional and/or philosophical statement rather than about the media used, the engineering of surfaces or interfaces.

HOW HAS YOUR STUDY AND EXPLORATION OF FIELDS OUTSIDE OF THE ARTS INFORMED YOUR ARTISTIC WORK, PARTICULARLY FEED? (ARCHITECTURE, SCIENCE OF THE BRAIN AND PERCEPTION, ETC.)

I started off studying architecture, before switching to Visual Arts. At the beginning of my art career in 1984 I built nonfunctional objects, partly absurd machines, with programmed light, kinetic and sounding components. I think my early affiliation with architecture still shows in my work. It becomes obvious in the way I use sound, as both a spatial and sculptural element of my work. With sculptural element I mean the spatial effects of sub low bass for instance, which create a kind of invisible but very physical fabric in a given space. It creates a shifting virtual architecture of sorts, resonating with the actual space where in it unfolds. This concept generally applies to the way I use sound in my work, its equally about “painting” with sound than composing along a timeline. My other big interest lies in concepts of perception, the way we experience the world, specifically space and time - how perception is such an individual- and highly malleable matter. Emotion seems to be at the core of reading what our perceptive organs tell us. Depending on our state of mind, in borderline situations, what comes across as pleasant one day might pain us the next. TO WHAT DEGREE DO YOU WRITE THE SOFTWARE THAT YOU USE? IF NOT, PLEASE DESCRIBE THE DERIVATION AND IF IT IS AVAILABLE COMMERCIALLY (SEAMUS PEOLLE WILL APPRECIATE THIS).

I use, whenever I can, off the shelve, yet customizable software, because, by today’s achievements in mainstream software, its covers all I need in 90% of my productions. I work with Logic Audio for 10 years, with Max/Msp only recently, Final Cut Pro, since it came out (Avid and Premiere before), a DMX interface / software solution called LanBox, great little thing from Holland, which allows me to control theatrical lights from Logic, synced to sound and video. As for my 3D work, I use Unreal Tournament as a real-time 3D engine.

Which brings me to one of those moments every couple of years when I decide to start an engineering process and build something myself, or have it built for me, because I can’t find it on the open market. When I did my second project with the Unreal Tournament engine for the “Cave” at Ars Electronica Center, Linz, I was drawing on the inbuilt audio options, which really are sample playback and 3D placements and mixing of such samples in a 3D environment. No synthesis, no modulations, no real event synchronization, other than common start points etc. From today’s standards very disappointing and so I pretty much decided on the spot to work on a custom connection between the engine and external standard audio software. More in my answer to the next question.

The other example for developing a unique system leads back to 1997, when together with my then partner in Granular-Synthesis we developed a mono video / audio sampling software called varp9, which ran on PC and allowed us to re- synthesize video in real-time, controlled through Midi from Logic Audio. This was a successful attempt to apply the concept of granular synthesis to a mono video/audio sample. Every sample was a max 128 video frames long (about 5sec in PAL) and through program changes a maximum of 48 samples (limit set purely by ram prices then) could be addressed. It turned out to be a very capable flicker engine; two individual AV streams could be dynamically intersected. I refrained form engineering for years after that, it took about 2.5 times as long as initially estimated, even though we worked with a capable programmer, who quickly managed to build the backbone of the software.

PLEASE COMMENT ON THE SPECIFIC SOFTWARE INVOLVED IN FEED (FLOATING BODIES AND GRANULAR SYNTHESIS)

I began working with Unreal Tournament in 2004, in preparation for a collaboration with the French Ballet Preljocaj. I needed a real-time tool for visualization of human motion, something that neither required editing or rendering, thus would allow, once setup, for intuitive access. As said above, the limited sound capabilities of Unreal quickly became a point of frustration; generally all game engines are putting their emphasis on visualization. I started to connect Unreal to an external audio engine in early 2005 together with the help of Michael Ferraro, who did the reverse engineering part on the TCP ports of Unreal (no real documentation there unless you have a developer license). He also built in Max/Msp a receiving and analyzing patch, partly custom modules, to interpret the incoming data into Midi controller data. Midi because its actually moved on to Logic where its finally controlling software synthesizers. Kind a convoluted but makes sense in my system, Logic being my central command post. So now all those floating bodies in my unreal world trigger, when moving, each a software synthesizer in Logic and I have full control of my little orchestra. Plus, I can control, in the other directions, with a midi controller the motions of the bodies in Unreal, thus being able of improvising with the system.

In more detail, each of the 3D bodies has 5 “active bones” or joints, which are tracked throughout a piece of calibrated virtual space. As they move in that space each bone/joint is sending out 4 values, x,y,z coordinates and a dynamic sum, delta, which measures momentum, how much overall has the sum of x,y,z changed within a time unit? For 8 bodies that results in 8x5x4 = 160 constantly updated control data streams transmitted from within Unreal. After processing in Max/Msp and being handed over to Logic Audio, 160 Continuous Controllers can now freely be allocated within a custom built Logic environment to control 20 individual parameters per software synthesizer. The synthesizers, ES2’s, of the virtual analog kind, run almost identical patches, micro tuned to each other. Each synthesizer is in unisono mode, using 4 voices. The resulting sound can be described as a drone, punctuated by Note On swells whenever one of the bodies jerks or convulses. Spatial location of each body within the given 3D space is expressed by translating the root bone’s x-axis value to define basic panorama and its z-axis value to increase, decrease basic loudness and thus the front<>back position. Bodies close to the front are therefore more prominent.

Generally, this being a procedural setting, the multiple bodies’ individual motions are rendering ever changing combination of motion paths and therefore an indefinitely changing sound-scape / drone. A basic script gives out kinetic startup points, in between those points of instruction the bodies are “on there own”.

IN FEED, TO WHAT EXTENT AND EXACTLY HOW (IF YOU CAN) DOES THE MUSIC SOFTWARE INFLUENCE THE VISUAL IN BOTH AREAS OF THE WORK? HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT DIRECTLY CONNECTING THE TWO AND/OR ABOUT PARALLEL CONNECTIONS (OR NO CONNECTIONS AT ALL LIKE JOHN CAGE)?

As laid out above, in the first part of FEED, the “concert for a flock of human bodies convulsing in zero gravity”, there is a direct connection between the sound and the visuals on screen. In addition to that I run some loop based audio textures and fields, which fill in both on the high- and low end, with the bodies, sound-wise, occupying the midrange. The add-on material is partly rhythmic, in the widest of senses, more pulse than beat.

As for the second part, the “strobing fog world”, there is an equally syn-esthetic component, which I build around the stroboscopes and PAR pulse lights. Both are emitting sound from their filaments and I pick up those sonic artifacts, Using a pick-up piezo mic for the standard lights and a mini solar panel for the strobes (thanks to Chris Musgrave), which gives a feedback free clear on/off voltage / sound right on. Three pick-up’s in total, 2 for the independent strobe lines, one for the Par’s. These signals are then fed into 2 effects processors, adding reverb and delay, and are massively cross fed back with each other in the mixing desk. The system is tuned so that before the beginning it’s already on the verge of self oscillation, as the show picks up momentum the sonic response is ever more increasing in intensity and resonance. I tweak it so that it has enough room to “breathe” without freaking.

To compose with audio and video in parallel, so that one reflects the other, Is probably my artistic signature, I started the habit in my video work in the late eighties and expanded on it during my collaboration with Granular-Synthesis during the nineties and the beginning of this century. What I did find out early on was that, not necessarily a clearly established direct connection was the most desirable, that in contrast, a syn-esthetic relation was just another, albeit powerful, aesthetic possibility. I started experimenting (and still do) with elements going in and out of sync and the starting/ stopping of parts intentionally reflecting each other. Matter of fact, we are trained perceiving in (massive) parallel and making sense of incoming expressions all the time, whether they are intentionally linked or randomly happen next to each other. By way of perception and the following process of analysis we constantly combine events that have nothing to do with each other, except we took them in at the same point in time. John Cage’s brilliance certainly was to point this out as awareness as well as a potential waiting to be drawn upon. In Feed I use both synchronized and unsynchronized modules, knowing that in the minds and bodies of my audience they’ll make perfect individual sense.

IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE WORK, EXACTLY WHAT IN THE INTERACTION OF THE STROBES FORCES THE BRAIN TO PRODUCE SUCH STUNNING PATTERNS? WOULD THEY BE JUST AS INTENSE IF YOU DID NOT USE MULTIPLE RHYTHMS IN THE PULSING AND WENT WITH SINGLE PULSES? IS THE FREQUENCY OF THE PULSING IMPORTANT (OR THE ACCELLERATION/DECELERATION)? HOW ABOUT THE COLOR PATTERS AND THEIR CHANGING? WHAT DOES THIS PRODUCE? HOW IMPORTANT IS THE AMOUNT OF WATTAGE OF EACH COMPONENT IN PRODUCING THE PATTERNS? IT SEEMS TO ME THAT THERE ARE MANY WAYS THAT THIS COULD BE TRIED AND FAIL TO PRODUCE AS INCREDIBLE AN EFFECT AS YOU DID. YOU MUST HAVE EXPERIMENTED TREMENDOUSLY BEFORE HITTING ON THE BEST SOLUTIONS. WHAT KINDS OF EXPERIMENTS TOWARD THIS GOAL DID YOU TRY AND THEN ABANDON? According to my research - which by no means I would claim to be exhaustive - what happens is a clash between the internal brain refresh cycle (of the visual processing parts of the brain) and the external flicker cycles of the stroboscopes. Once the fog part is under way, the strobes fade in at about 8hz, from there, until the end of the piece, they go up to a maximum of about 24hz. Normally, at the beginning of the fog part, people in the audience will, in terms of brain refresh cycles, have arrived in an alpha state, their brain individually refreshing in between 8-13hz. Now two things seem to happen, A) Generally, stroboscopic flicker in a range between 8-13Hz appears to break down some of the physiological barriers between different regions of the brain and B) The (external) flicker rates of the strobes interfere with the (internal) brain refresh rates of the visual cortex resulting in actual interference patterns. These 2D/3D psychedelic patterns, experienced in such an environment, are differing from individual to individual depending on the respective personal brain refresh rate and other factors linked to imaginative and other predispositions. There is a very good introduction on the topic in a book called “Chapel of the Extreme Experience - A short history of Stroboscopic Flicker and the Dream Machine” by John Geiger, Soft Skull Press.

The intensity of the patterns changes according to increase / decrease in light intensity of the strobes- and the flicker frequency. It also changes with the intersected pulse lights, which temporarily subdue and reignite the impression. Feed uses two independent sections of strobes, which, when set to differing frequencies, creating interference on their own, all of which is constantly “frustrating” the brain’s attempt to properly “see” and thus constantly animating the brain to ever new interpretations of the reality at hand.

Generally the brighter the flicker and the more filling one’s entire field of view, the more instantly the patterns emerge. This relies for the most part on the very dense fog, which erases any idea of physical space, depth of space and resets one’s sense of orientation. The fog really brings the flicker to the plane of the retina, allowing no distance or escape from it, the eye is reduced to a basic brightness-, contrast- and color sensor, all the perceived patterns then being “invented” in brain.

I worked with flicker in my video work for about 6 years in an attempt to at least somewhat lifting the video off the flat screen and have it pulsating in space. The light element of video becomes equally prominent when using flicker, but still the inherent flatness of projected video remained a source of frustration. The idea to work with fog and strobes goes back to a couple of intense experiences in fog, both up in the mountains, where walking into a bank of clouds on an otherwise sunny day leads one into this evenly lit serene moment of peace and beauty, as well as finding myself in a hard core techno club in Brussels sometime in the early nineties, which was just packed with fog and sound. Like often with ideas, I carried this one around for years before I eventually started the research, most of it empirical in nature in my studio. I was thrilled right from the first test, to see that my imagination was surpassed by the early results. From there, through a series of tests and sequences, I started building a vocabulary, which I am still expanding on, still excited. I feel I have scratched just a bit under the surface, so that makes me happy, much more things to find out.

BEFORE PRODUCING FEED, HAD YOU DONE ANY SMALLER EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES IN WHICH YOU WORKED OUT THE CONCEPTUAL AND TECHNICAL CHALLENGES?

Other than my prior work with video flicker and my stroboscopic light work as part of my collaboration with Ballet Preljocaj, I started working in this particular way in 2005 for Feed. I guess you could say, in the course of a longer working career one builds up skills and experiences, which later on allow to be combined into further leading enterprises. That’s what it felt like.

WHAT ARE YOUR FUTURE PROJECTS AND WILL YOU BE TOURING IN THE USA SEEKING ENGAGEMENTS? I'LL BE HAPPY TO INCLUDE ANY PUBLICITY BLURB KIND OF MATERIAL YOU CARE TO INCLUDE AT THE END. YOU COULD WRITE IT IN THE THIRD PERSON IF YOU WANT. BE SURE TO INCLUDE URLs AND EMAIL ADDRESSES THAT YOU WOULD WANT PUBLISHED.

Currently working on 2 new projects, both long term, one is an opera sort of called “SplendidVoid” a one actor (in the flesh) show which deals with the topic of immortality and omnipotence fantasies, enabled through technological progress as we know it. Part high tech spectacle, part primal performance, scheduled for 2008/09.

The second project is an installation called “level”, which installs typical artifacts found in game environments into an actual space, a maze brimming with audio loops, animated visual textures, remote video feeds, flickering lights and a choir of disorientated avatars / bots, a kind of contemporary “Gesamtkunstwerk”.

Feed is invited to Montreal, at the Elektra Festival 10-12th of May, otherwise no north American gigs so far this year – gladly taking offers.

My website is: www.hentschlager.info (which includes access to the Granular- Synthesis site)

WHAT IS THE VARIABILITY OF RESPONSE TO THE AUDIENCE'S PATTERN GENERATION IN FEED? DO SOME PEOPLE EXPERIENCE NO PATTERNS AT ALL? ARE THERE SOME RESPONSE TRAITS COMMON TO ALL? From what I hear back from my audience everybody sees patterns, some of them see purely geometrical or abstract ones, others see realist forms embedded, animated scenes, etc. The individual response I believe depends entirely on one’s predisposition and brain state.

IF ONE EXPERIENCES MORE THAN ONE PERFORMANCE OF FEED, CAN THEY GROW WITH THE EXPERIENCE IN BEING MORE CONSCIOUSLY PROACTIVE IN ELICITING THEIR OWN BRAIN RESPONSES (I KNOW THAT IN MY ONLY EXPERIENCE WITH FEED, I WAS PRETTY MUCH JUST OVERWHELMED, BUT IF I HAD A SECOND EXPERIENCE, AND IN ANTICIPATION OF WHAT WAS TO COME, I MIGHT TRY TO DIRECT MY BRAIN TOWARD CERTAIN RESPONSES. IS THIS POSSIBLE)?

This I could not answer, lacking proper statistics. I myself usually am too busy during the show with delivering it. The show is never the same in the first place, I improvise vastly in the second part, to keep it fresh for myself and therefore you would have a different experience the second time in any case.

HOW DO YOU FIND THE USA IN TERMS OF PROFESSIONAL OPPORTUNITIES (COMMISSIONS, GRANTS, TOURS, PERFORMANCES) WHEN COMPARED TO YOUR WORK IN EUROPE (IN MOST CASES IT IS THE AMERICAN ARTIST WHO MIGRATES TO EUROPE IN SEARCH OF THESE OPPORTUNITIES, AND IT IS MORE RARE, I THINK, TO DO WHAT YOU ARE DOING).

Well, in good years I make about 25% of my income here, after living in New York for 8 years now. And yes, I am touring in Europe and Asia, as most of my American colleagues. In that sense I have truly arrived. I say this without a sense of bitterness. I have gained much insight, experience and friends immigrating to the US and continue to be intrigued by the ambivalent cultural forces at play. Its by no means a comfortable resting ground for artists, unless, that is, one finds good representation. Being this place of extremes and often contradicting dynamics between utmost individualism and fundamentalism, I find living here, from an artist’s point of view, extremely attractive. I understand also that to continue staying here in the long term I either need to find a teaching post or alternatively win in the lottery. Both are options worth considering. NIM XXVI February 16, 2006

www.nimmagazine.it http://www.nimmagazine.it/node/54 )

Francesco D’Orazio

FEED An ob-scene performance

Kurt Hentschlager's performance is one of the most powerful and invasive performances I ever experienced. It is definitely one of the most intelligent implementations of the idea of immersive communication.

Why is FEED that good? It stresses the visual, audio, olfactory and tactile limits of human perception telling us a story about the evolution of media and the evolution of our sensory experience of the world. Let's start from the very beginning.

We sit in a completely dark environment, with a black screen and a soundscape interwoven with low indistinguishable frequencies that slowly grow and define themselves. As the sound assumes barely identifiable shapes the black screen starts showing first one, then many identical 3D human body models, sexually ambiguous, with no face and completely naked. The bodies fluctuate in the black liquid space of the screen, only moved by sound frequencies that force them into periodical spasmodic contortions. The movements are "procedural", i.e. not manually animated but constantly generated by a video-game graphic engine. The power of sound, the number of bodies and of the convulsions grows progressively in rhythm and intensity until reaching an extreme peak... when the system suddenly shuts down. We're all again immersed in darkness... but what kind of darkness? Many smoke jets suddenly start flooding the room until it’s completely saturated. The fog is so thick that one can neither see one’s body, nor one’s hands. It’s about completely loosing perception. All is touch, hearing and smell. Now our real, analog bodies begin fluctuating to the tactile stimulations of massive bass sounds, noses are filled with the smell of dry ice, strobe lightning and colored lamps illuminate the space, evenly spreading through the thick white air. Visual stimulations become so fast and violent that the retina can’t even process them and so generates transformative fractals of various colors and shapes. The fog is so dense it feels like touching light.

Thick fog, visual and audio hyper-stimulation shatters the frontal dimension of theatrical spectacle and give an uncanny, oppressive and sacral sensation all at the same time: we are actually inside the liquid blackness of that screen, totally at the mercy of a powerful flow of sound and light. The audience’s bodies have replaced the asexual 3D models. Or, better, the screen has wrapped up the physical space through a genial amputation of sight, which has completely reshaped the audience’s ”sense- ratio”. The fog cuts out sight and transforms any visual stimulation into a tactile stimulation. But this is exactly the way media environments evolve, dulling some senses to the advantage of others. This is why FEED is not only a performance but a story of the evolution of media from a screen paradigm to an immersion paradigm that’s no longer based on the detachment of sight but on the ob-scenity of touch which destroys the “scene” distance between the sign and the audience. In short – we witness the history of media from the age of spectacle to the age of experience in fifty minutes. Absolutely McLuhanesque! Articoli| Recensioni| Agenda| NIM Libri| NIM|

Per iscriversi alla newsletter è Home necessario creare un nuovo profilo Feed Login utente Performance di Kurt Hentschlager media art @ Netmage 2006 Nome utente: on line

C’erano una serie di motivi per fare un salto a Netmage a Bologna anche Password: quest’anno. Tra i vari l’unico che ha resistito fino in fondo al test dell’esperienza è stato Feed, la performance presentata da Kurt Hentschlager (Granular Synthesis), la più potente e invasiva esperienza immersiva che io abbia mai sperimentato e decisamente una delle realizzazioni più intelligenti dell’idea di immersione. Entra Feed gioca costantemente sul forzare i limiti visivi, uditivi, olfattivi e tattili della percezione umana. La performance inizia in un ambiente buio, con uno schermo Crea nuovo profilo nero e un paesaggio sonoro fatto di frequenze basse indistinguibili che crescono e si Richiedi nuova password definiscono lentamente. Man mano che il suono assume una forma, sullo schermo nero comincia a comparire prima uno poi molti corpi umani tridimensionali, Navigazione sessualmente indefiniti e senza volto, completamente nudi. I corpi fluttuano nello spazio nero dello schermo mossi solo dalle frequenze del suono che li costringono a contenuti recenti contorsioni spasmodiche. I movimenti dei corpi sono “procedurali” cioè non animati manualmente ma generati costantemente da un motore grafico da videogiochi. Il Rubriche suono, il numero dei corpi fluttuanti e delle convulsioni crescono di ritmo e intensità accademia fino ad arrivare ad un picco massimo, raggiunto il quale il sistema si spegne. Lo always on schermo è nero, la trama sonora torna ad essere leggera e indistinguibile. Una serie antroposfera di getti di fumo bianco cominciano allora ad invadere la sala fino a saturarla architettura e arti completamente. La nebbia è talmente fitta che è impossibile vedere il resto del didattica e tecnologie proprio corpo. Persino le mani diventano invisibili. Si perde completamente la geomedia sensazione di propriocezione. Tutto diventa tatto, udito e olfatto. I corpi cominciano letteratura a fluttuare al suono tattile delle potenti stimolazioni sonore, il naso si riempie media art dell’odore del fumo, lampi stroboscopici e fari cominciano ad illuminare lo spazio e a media e politica diffondersi in modo uniforme attraverso una nebbia talmente fitta che si ha la media philosophy sensazione di poter toccare la luce. Le stimolazioni visive sono talmente veloci che la musica retina non riesce a elaborarle e genera così ogni sorta di forma e fenomeno pubblicitá, marketing, impresa percettivo, frattali di colori diversi e in continua trasformazione. recensioni La nebbia fitta e l’iperstimolazione visiva e uditiva rompono la frontalità dello semiosfera spettacolo e danno la sensazione, allo stesso tempo sacrale e oppressiva, di essere social software finiti dentro quello schermo nero, totalmente in balìa di un incontrollabile flusso di tecnopsicologia suono e luce. I corpi del pubblico hanno sostituito i modelli tridimensionali asessuati, visioni o meglio, lo schermo ha avvolto lo spazio fisico attraverso una geniale amputazione della vista che ristruttura completamente il sensorio del pubblico. Media come esperienza, esperienza come linguaggio. Il linguaggio mediale si evolve provocando una mutazione sensoriale basata sull’intorpidimento e l’amputazione di alcuni sensi a vantaggio di altri. La storia dei media dall’età dello spettacolo all’età dell’esperienza in cinquanta minuti. Puro McLuhan.

Concept & Composition © Kurt Hentschlager Technical Realization & Programming “Sounding Unreal Bodies” Michael Ferraro / Possible World 3D Modeling & Character Design Claudia Hart & Francisco Narango

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